Germany breaks download speed record

Kabel Deutschland claims it has the technology to carry out broadband download speeds of 4700 Mbps.

Apparently the speed was managed during one of the company’s real world field tests.

It breaks a record set in 2007 by a 75 year old Swedish woman who did the feat at 40 Gigabits per second.

KD said that its current network in the city of Schwerin delivers a more standard speed of up to 100Mbps for home subscribers, yet clearly they could go a lot faster.

Lorenz Glatz, CTO of Kabel Deutschland, said that the Schwerin field test shows that an 862 MHz upgraded cable network is able to broadcast download speeds of up to 4.7 Gbit/s.

Using this speed, a DVD could theoretically be downloaded within eight seconds. Current standard laptops or modems cannot even process these high speeds. It will take many more years until users find online services and web content that need a download speed of up to 4.7 Gbit/s.

The field test did not require any new engineering work. It would appear that the system used channel bundling. If this is the case then it would limit the commercial uses of that particular speed. The cable company would need to leave some capacity spare for their other services and not hand over the whole cable to one customer.